Our Core Beliefs

An Opinionated Company

We are an opinionated group of people, and this is what we believe:

On Hiring

We believe that nearly every Role at Action Verb would be best filled by someone with programming skills. As a process-driven company that strongly believes in automation, we want even our support staff to be able to code where possible. We'd like to see our lawyers, accountants, and even travel agents write code.

We believe that the best employees have both academic foundations and practical experience. Our interview process tests your subject matter understanding at a deep level. We want people who understand how things work and why they work the way that they do. And we also want people who have real world work experience, ideally at a company that's even more successful than us. Being able to teach you would be great, but being able to learn from you would be even better.

We believe that recruiting and hiring top talent is very hard. Our success depends on finding the best engineers out there, so we've invested heavily in our recruiting and interviewing processes. Making our next hire even better than the last is one of our highest priorities.

We believe that every team member is welcome to participate in the hiring process. We require a YES from every interviewer that speaks to a candidate, and anyone on the team can be an interviewer. We expect this process to result in an ever-increasing caliber of new hires.

On Working from Home

We believe that allowing and supporting 100% remote work gives us access to great people we wouldn't otherwise be able to hire. We tend to hire folks who are later in their careers, which means they usually have their family established somewhere. By offering remote work, we can hire the best people no matter where they're located.

We believe that remote work is actually harder than in-office work. The biggest challenge that we experience with a remote team is keeping everyone in sync. We lean heavily on tools like Slack and our own custom built tools that support the avOS system.

We believe that in-person interaction is key for a remote team. Our team spends at least 12 days together in four quarterly meetings each year, in various cities across the country.

On Security

We believe the need for cybersecurity is greater now than it ever has been. Cyberattacks have become more frequent and we expect their frequency to continue increasing in the coming years.

We believe that if a service is advertised as secure, it better be secure against all known attacks. We set very high standards for the products we label as secure. We don't just want to meet the standards set forth by PCI and ISO, we want to do everything possible to secure our customers' data.

We believe that security is everyone's responsibility, even our customers. We resolve to keep our customers secure against evolving threats, even if it means they might have to do some work on their end to keep up with a changing security landscape.

We believe that security policies, procedures, and controls are important. We are disgusted by companies that don't take their documentation of controls seriously. We commit to completing a third party audit of our security controls by the end of this year.

On Engineering

We believe the best engineers tend to be polyglots with a wide variety of programming language experience. We don't hire for specific programming language skills, but rather look for engineers who are fluent in several languages. We want our staff to be adaptable and ready to evolve for what's next.

We believe that building great infrastructure and platform products requires a great internal infrastructure. We have Continuous Integration, a full staging environment, and considerable test coverage. We built our own application deployment system. We self-manage our server environment on Amazon Web Services and custom hardware.

We believe in using the right tool for the job. Our core applications are built in Ruby, JavaScript, Java, C++, and PHP. We use Rails, React, Chef, Qt, Jenkins, GitHub, CodeTree, Honeybadger, CircleCI, Maven, AWS, MySQL, Redis, Elastic Search, Memcached, Haml, Sass, and many other exciting open source systems. We don't want to get stuck in the trap of using a language or a tool just because "that's how it's done around here."

We believe that engineers should support what they build. We expect our teammates to take responsibility for the engineering decisions they make. If there are performance problems in production, nobody should have to chase anyone down. All engineers participate in 24/7 on-call rotation and all engineers speak to customers.

On Product

We believe in building products that we actually use ourselves. We are our own toughest critics and we put all of our products through their paces every day.

We believe our products will never be finished. The pace of change in the world will never slow down. It's our responsibility to continue to evaluate how our products compete in the marketplace and to evolve them to stay up to date.

We believe that talking about features often takes longer than building them in the first place. We eschew long prioritization meetings, and just go build things as fast as we can.

We believe that in many ways, the UX is the product. A feature is no good if nobody can find it or use it. We commit to having great UX and design that is both beautiful and functional.

On Open Source

We believe in using open source tools and components wherever possible. We aren't afraid to go under the hood and make changes to the open source packages that we use. And indeed, we maintain an internal patch set to just about every major codebase we leverage.

We believe that open source only works if companies give back. We encourage our engineers to contribute improvements to the open source projects we use. If one of our staff agrees to speak at a conference, we pick up the tab, and we encourage our people to get out there and talk about what they're up to.

We believe that customers who build on top of our products shouldn't experience vendor lock-in. That's why we publish the full source code to Vae Platform's rendering engine. And we encourage our customers to submit pull requests to us as well.

What Do You Believe?

Are you an Engineer with an opinion? Do our core beliefs resonate with you?

And that goes double if you agree with most of the above, but think there might be something missing. Action Verb inherited its Core Beliefts from the beliefs of our founder, but they're not gospel. These are living written representations of our shared vision, and we want new employees to help us grow and evolve.